Among the many efforts to facilitate refugee access to higher education, one of the most groundbreaking is provided by Kiron University, a non-profit, crowd-funded online university that was founded in 2015 with the exclusive goal of educating refugees. The institution partners with online education platforms like coursera or edx to provide free online courses, using existing online course offerings by world-class universities including Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, or MIT. The service offered by Kiron University is remarkable: Not only does the institution not have academic admission requirements, language, passport and residency requirements, or, for that matter, any other forms of bureaucratic hurdles; it even provides each student with a free laptop and internet access.
Kiron is not a recognized university in Germany and does not award degrees. But 22 partner universities in Germany and other countries currently allow Kiron students to transfer into their degree programs, usually after completion of four semesters of study at Kiron University. The large number of donations and applications that Kiron has received since its foundation are testament to the fact that many refugees are seeking a less bureaucratic and more immediate alternative to the comparatively hurdled long-term pathways available at German brick-and-mortar universities. In its first semester alone, Kiron received 5,000 applications, 80 percent of them from Syrian refugees. The institution currently enrolls 2,300 refugees.
Source: http://wenr.wes.org/2017/05/lessons-germanys-refugee-crisis-integration-costs-benefits
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